The Mississippi Quarterly articles from June 2003

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from June 2003

The human face of the age: the physical cruelty of slavery and the modern American novel.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world. --Theodor Adorno (1) IN CHARLES FRAZIER'S Cold Mountain, Inman, the novel's Odyssean wanderer, comes across a peddler who tells him of the cruelty he has seen in his...

Perversely reading Kate Chopin's "Fedora".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... KATE CHOPIN'S "FEDORA" IS SURELY one of her most interesting and ambiguous stories. Published in 1895, under the pen name "La Tour" and the title "The Falling in Love of Fedora," "Fedora" is a very brief story recounting the experience of its...

The body, the critics, and "The Artificial Nigger".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S STORIES PROVIDE some of the most penetrating dissections of white solipsism that American literature has to offer. (1) Of the many stories that include overt white perspectives on race, "The Artificial Nigger" is arguably...

From Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky in The Moviegoer.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... WHEN, IN 1983, ROBIN LEARY ASKED WALKER PERCY, "What were perhaps your most significant transitions philosophically?" he replied, in part, "From Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky." He diplomatically added: "Though, in no case did I lose admiration for...

Were farms necessary?: the agrarian question.(The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after "I'll Take My Stand")(Fugitive Theory: Political Theory, the Southern Agrarians, and America)(The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after "I'll Take My Stand," edited by Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. xi, 336m pp. $45.00 cloth. The Rebuke of History: The Southern...

South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-First Century.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... edited by Fred Hobson. Mercer University, Lamar Memorial Lectures, no. 44. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. ix, 108 pp. $24.95. CONTRARY TO WHAT ITS TITLE SUGGESTS, South to the Future is invested in revising rather than repeating...

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xxvi. 235 pp. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. THE LAST TIME "WELLSPRINGS" WAS SEEN in the sub-title of a work on Southern literature must have been forty years ago in...

Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Robert Carr. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 368 pp. $64.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. IN DISCUSSING "REPRESENTATIVE MEN" of the African-American community, scholars have raised many crucial yet difficult questions. What is the...

Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 152 pp. $28.00. AS A FRAMEWORK FOR CRITICAL ANALYSES, literary regionalism has weathered several storms over the years. After its heydey in the 1930s and 40s with the...

The Planter's Prospect: Privilege & Slavery in Plantation Paintings.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by John Michael Vlach. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 240 pp. $49.95 Cloth. $24.95 Paper. JOHN VLACH BEGINS The Planter's Prospect by pointing out a basic contradiction: in the antebellum South, slavery was the...

The Rise of Southern Republicans.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Earl Black and Merle Black. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. viii, 442 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95 cloth. SOUTHERN WHITES REGULARLY QUESTIONED their allegiance to the Democratic party by the time of the...

Gender and the Southern Body Politic.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... edited by Nancy Bercaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. xix, 259 pp. $35.00 cloth. RELATIVELY QUICKLY, AS HISTORIANS MEASURE TIME, the study of "women's history" has been joined by the study of gender as, in the words of...

William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by James G. Watson. Literary Modernism Series. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. xvi, 255 pp. 11 halftones, 9 line drawings. $24.95 paper (2002). JAMES G. WATSON'S FOURTH BOOK ABOUT William Faulkner in some ways builds upon his...

Strange and Lurid Bloom: A Study of the Fiction of Caroline Gordon.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Anne M. Boyle. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.205 pp. $41.50. BASED ON THE ASTUTE ASSUMPTION THAT "Caroline Gordon seems to be a prime candidate for [canonical] recovery" (p. 33), Anne Boyle's critical reassessment...

Tennessee Williams and the South.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. vii, 184 pp. $30.00. BEYOND QUESTION, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS is the South's most significant playwright and, arguably, America's too. An extensive...

Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, by Philip C. Kolin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.250 pp. $23.00; The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays, by Annette J. Saddik. Madison: Fairleigh...

Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism, by R. Neil Scott. Milledgeville, Georgia: Timberlane Books, 2002. 1,086 pp. $127.95; Precision and Depth in Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories, by Karl-Heinz Westarp. Aarhus, Denmark:...

Understanding Fred Chappell.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Understanding Fred Chappell, by John Lang. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. 325 pp. $34.95. FRED CHAPPELL IS CONSIDERED BY MANY SCHOLARS of Southern literature to be our premier contemporary person of letters. He has won...

Cormac McCarthy: New Directions.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. 320 pp. $29.95. CORMAC MCCARTHY'S MASTERPIECE IS Blood Meridian, a bloody and disturbing and unforgettable novel, with prose, as...